Teaching and Learning Celebration NY – Speaker Deborah Meier

Today, the third annual Teaching and Learning Celebration started today in New York. Working with educational consultant Melinda Pongrey, I helped produce a couple of live on-line radio talk shows for LD Live of conference speakers. The below interveiw with Deborah Meier was pre-recorded on Wednesday and is now available as a podcast. During the two day conference, there will be live reports from the event that can be heard on the LD Live blog.

Deborah W. Meier, a presenter at the 2008 Teaching and Learning Celebration March 7 in New York City, talks with Melinda Pongrey about how she views education and what is needed for students today. Deborah is currently on the faculty of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, as senior scholar and adjunct professor as well as Board member and director of New Ventures at Mission Hill, director and advisor to Forum for Democracy and Education, and on the Board of The Coalition of Essential Schools.

Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and headstart teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City schools. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem. In 1985 she founded Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school in which more than 90% of the entering students went on to college, mostly to 4-year schools. During this period she founded a local Coalition center, which networked approximately fifty small Coalition-style K-12 schools in the city. Deborah Meier Bio

Deborah also writes a “point-counter-point” blog for Educational Week called Bridging Differences with Diane Ravitch.